wbar is an amazing light-weight dock application that I have been using with FluxBox for years. Recently, with the release of WEAKERTH4N: BLUE GHOST, I made my own icon theme and set for the distro which clashed with the white letters used in the text of wbar making it unreadable:
So I decided to download the latest version of wbar and take a looksy at the sauce. To compile this code you will need the following dependencies:
libglade2-dev
libimlib2-dev
intltool
Which you can install on Debian systems with aptitude – no problem.
I use grep when troubleshooting or reverse engineering code – it’s my first go-to for analyzing other’s code. I grepped recursively for the word color and found the lines:
/* draw text */
imlib_context_set_color(0, 0, 0, 255);
imlib_text_draw(tw+1, th+1, cur_ic->text.c_str());
imlib_context_set_color(255, 255, 255, 255);
In the file ./src/core/SuperBar.cc This function [imlib_context_set_color] looks familiar and the values are R,G,B,A for red-green-blue-and transparency respectively. Also I knew that the color white is all colors combined and usually has the highest values: (HEX) #ffffff or in our case or 256 bit (RGB) (0-255), 255-255-255. Black is the lowest: (HEX) #000000 or 0,0,0 in 256 bit RGB. Then I looked up the RGB set for the color yellow to match my theme and found that it was 255,255,0 and HEX #ffff00. I changed the bottom function (since they are just layers – i figured the bottom layer was for the shadow) and ran:
make clean && make uninstall && make && make install
It worked! The first function [imlib_context_set_color] makes the color of the drop shadow, which is black. So then I decided to make the line unique by removing the spaces between the commas and integers like so:
imlib_context_set_color(255,255,255,255);
which obviously didn’t break the function and then wrote a simple sed script to change the color on the fly -pre-compilation:
#!/bin/bash
sed -i -r -e "s/(imlib_context_set_color\()[0-9]+,[0-9]+,[0-9]+,[0-9]+\)/\1$1,$2,$3,$4\)/" src/core/SuperBar.cc
Now we can just look up the color code in a chart like this one: http://www.tayloredmktg.com/rgb/ and pass the values ot the script like so:
./colorchange.sh 255 255 0 255
The lower the last number, the more transparent the text color will be, but make sure you match it with the shadow!
~Douglas
